Abstract
The dialect of the city of Kumamoto and its surrounding area is said to lack lexical accent systems. This research investigated tonal phrases in spoken discourses of young Kumamoto dialect speakers. A tonal phrase is defined as a minimal tonal unit comprising a rise and fall in pitch. Results of the acoustic analysis revealed that tonal phrases in our data could be classified into eight basic types including those that had not been identified in previous research. In addition, it was shown that in about half of the cases, a tonal phrase corresponds with a minimal syntactic phrase (comprising a content word followed by zero or more functional words), and when a syntactic phrase semantically modifies the following phrase, they mostly form a tonal phrase.
